


Run

by Helholden



Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Hospitals, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Manipulation, Mind Control, Stalking, Underage Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-18
Updated: 2015-05-18
Packaged: 2018-03-31 03:14:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3962317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Helholden/pseuds/Helholden
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s Allison’s idea. Give back to the community, so every Wednesday evening after school, Lydia volunteers at the long term care facility.</p><p>Or, instead of Jennifer, there’s Lydia.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Run

**Author's Note:**

> Lydia is a minor since this takes place during season one, but nothing sexual occurs, not even a kiss, so I didn't put an Underage warning on the fic. It's still good and creepy, though.

_* * *_

 

It’s a stupid idea.

 

In fact, it’s Allison’s idea. Allison’s idea that they do something constructive with their free time. Allison’s idea that they give back to the community in a positive way. Lydia suggested a food drive or baking cookies. Things that normal people do to help the community, but no, they had to follow _Allison’s_ idea.

 

Allison’s idea was volunteer work, which led Lydia to the glass doors of the long term care facility of Beacon Hills Memorial Hospital.

 

She stares up at the doors, sighing deeply as she rolls her eyes. Her gaze shifts to the sign, _Beacons Crossing Home_ , and she makes a sour face as she glances back at the entrance. Lydia bites her lips together in annoyance and steels herself for the inevitable fate that is about to befall her.

 

This was not how she intended to spend her free time.

 

She shuffles in, states her purpose, and fills out a couple of pages of paperwork that are required for volunteers before they can begin. They also almost request a background check until she hands them her driver’s license. She is sixteen. Lydia purses her lips, lifting her eyebrows as they look at it, and then they pass it back to her and just ask her if she’s ever been in any trouble. Lydia answers promptly, “No.” The nurse shuffles through a stack of papers, presumably to assign her to somebody of their choice, and Lydia cuts in with, “Can I pick?”

 

The nurse gives her a funny look. “Well,” she explains, “there are certain patients who need more care than others, and we can’t—”

 

“I won’t pick one of those,” Lydia says quickly, shaking her head. “Trust me. The simpler, the better.”

 

The nurse narrows her eyes this time, but she nods her head. “All right, just let me—”

 

“I can handle it, thanks,” Lydia says with one of her signature sweet smiles, and she turns on her heels away from the front desk to saunter off.

 

She wanders around for a while, not quite sure who she should be looking for or what, until she stumbles upon a room with its door ajar and utter silence coming from within. It’s a little creepy, but curiosity gets the better of her, and she makes her way to the room, pushes on the door, and peeks in to look around and get a glimpse of what’s inside.

 

Lydia steps in but pauses halfway past the door, spotting a catatonic patient in a wheelchair by the window. Deep burn scars blotch half of his face, crawling up from under the collar of his shirt. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t look at her. He doesn’t talk. He is as still as a marble statue, and Lydia has to wonder for a second if he’s even alive in there.

 

She creeps in quietly, but the door squeaks behind her. It startles Lydia, and she glances back for a second before returning her attention forward. Despite her jittery nerves at being in this place, she crosses the room to stand in front of him.

 

Due to her suspicions, she carefully reaches out for his hand to feel his pulse. It is there, beating steadily under the surface.

 

“Hmm,” Lydia says, plopping down into the seat across from him. She stares at him, wondering if he can see her. Wondering if he even knows she is there.

 

His eyes gaze forward without a reaction. He doesn’t even blink.

 

“You’re going to be my new best friend,” Lydia finally says with a smile, already welcoming the blissful silence she will receive by volunteering for him.

 

-

 

At first, she practices her Archaic Latin around him.

 

It starts off with her just reading it aloud and repetition, eventually descending into Lydia maintaining a conversation with herself using her normal voice and a deeper voice that is meant to be Peter’s—and that’s his name, Peter, because she read it on his door after she picked him and one of the nurses made such a scene over it, but they let Lydia have it in the end.

 

She does her homework there in his room, too, because it’s so quiet she can focus on anything, and she lays out on his bed on her tummy, legs in air and crossed at the ankles, while he sits in the wheelchair.

 

Peter doesn’t mind.

 

He doesn’t mind anything.

 

She turns him to face her sometimes, walks through the steps out loud, and looks to him for confirmation even though he can’t speak and can’t hear her, because it helps her to figure out the problems faster. Peter just listens through it all, silent, unmoving, unblinking.

 

By accident, Lydia falls asleep in the middle of her homework one time. She had barely gotten any sleep the night before working on a term paper, so it just happens. She nods off. The nurses have a fit when they find her asleep in his bed. They almost revoke her volunteering privileges, calling it _unseemly behavior_ , but Lydia argues out the matter, explaining herself, and they let her off the hook this time.

 

 _But only this once_ , they say.

 

-

 

A few weeks in, Lydia realizes Peter doesn’t have any visitors. He never receives any _Get Well Soon_ cards, flowers, or balloons. Lydia doesn’t know if he has family around here, but judging by the lack of acknowledgment, she assumes he is the last one left—or, worse, forgotten and unwanted by those who left him behind.

 

The little table by his bedside remains empty, and Lydia stares at it, starting, for the first time, to feel sorry for him.

 

-

 

She comes in one day, grinning, bearing a vase of flowers and glittery card in one hand.

 

“Look what _I_ brought you,” Lydia says happily, and she sets them down on the nightstand, arranging the flowers neatly and leaning over to smell them. She sets the card up beside the vase, signed only by her and Allison, but still, it’s better than nothing. Something is always better than nothing.

 

Lydia is never nervous, but she folds her hands fretfully in front of herself as she turns to face him. His wheelchair is facing the door today, not the window, and Lydia doesn’t know if he can see his gifts or not. Finally, she realizes she doesn’t actually know the full extent of his condition.

 

“I thought they would be nice,” she adds in a quieter voice, and her hands feel a little sweaty. She gestures around them. “A nice addition to your room.”

 

After a moment, Lydia can’t stay there. She hurries out of the door, leaving his room to go to the front desk, and asks if she can read Peter’s public files so she can get a better understanding of what had happened to him. Lydia tops it off by saying it will help her to be a better volunteer, and the lady behind the desk gives her look before consigning to it.

 

The files yield to her his condition and everything she suspected, but Lydia takes the search home and looks up information on the house fire as well.

 

She wants to know everything.

 

-

 

The next time she visits Peter, there is an angry, empty hole in her chest now that she knows what had happened to him.

 

A house fire. It swallowed everyone up. Miraculously, he survived. No one else made it out alive, just him, a former shell of the person he used to be.

 

Lydia scoots a chair closer to him and sits down in it. She tries to imagine how he must have felt, holed up, surrounded on all angles by fire, burning, while people screamed and screamed around him—not just any people either. His family, his loved ones. Innocent children. A sister, cousins. Nieces, nephews, babies in their cribs.

 

The report said he was found with a child in his arms. The child didn’t make it.

 

He did.

 

Lydia stares at him wordlessly. Her throat feels tight. She leans closer, wanting to hug him, before realizing how weird it seems in her head. Glancing down, she reaches out for his hand instead, takes it into her own, and says, “I know what happened to you.”

 

Most people in the hospital have a scent to them, a stench of decay beneath cheap soap that says _I’m slowly rotting away_.

 

Peter doesn’t have that scent.

 

This is the first time Lydia has ever been this close to him, outside of moving his wheelchair around the room, but she notices it. He smells fresh and masculine, nothing like the other patients here. His body, aside from its catatonic state, is in sound physical condition, the cells repairing at a healthy rate.

 

 _Maybe one day he’ll wake up_ , Lydia thinks.

 

She wonders if anyone will be there for him when he does.

 

-

 

His hair grows too long. Lydia buys a pair of shears to cut it.

 

She stands behind his wheelchair, piecing his hair apart with her fingers, moving slowly because she isn’t exactly skilled at this, but she’s not a total disaster either. She runs her fingers over his scalp when she’s done, checking lengths, trimming forgotten strands, shaking off chopped hair. She brushes off his shoulders when she is done, admires her handiwork, and holds up a mirror for him to see. Lydia doesn’t know if he sees, but she likes to hope that he does.

 

Afterwards, she cleans up the hair and throws it away.

 

-

 

Lydia brings more flowers whenever the previous ones dry out, and sometimes she brings a new card, too. She leaves the previous ones there, so they begin to pile up and make the table look full.

 

She stops being selfish when she goes. She stops doing her homework there and saves it for home. She brings books and reads to him. Science fiction novels and dystopian landscapes, mostly, but sometimes she ventures into political fiction and popular satire.

 

She always makes sure he is facing the window when she leaves.

 

It’s good for him to look outside instead of staring at the four walls trapping him here.

 

-

 

“My parents are getting a divorce,” Lydia says one day.

 

She doesn’t know why she is telling him. Lately, she has been spilling all sorts of secrets to Peter. It’s not like he’s going to tell anyone, anyway. He’s catatonic. He is her diary, and all of her secrets are safe in him.

 

She reveals her fights with Jackson to him—complains, actually. Tells him about her friends and the things they do together as well as the latest person to get on her nerves and why. She tells Peter how she sneaks out from time to time, hiding it from her parents, the prescription pills that she sometimes abuses, stolen from her mother’s dresser drawer and used to help her sleep better at night whenever she’s stressed out. There are times when she just takes them to feel good, though, to feel disconnected from reality.

 

Lydia knows why she keeps talking. After all, it’s not like he can hear her. She needs to get it all out, and Peter is the only person who can listen to her without passing judgment. “They’re so busy screaming at each other,” she goes on, “they don’t even realize I’m not home right now.” Her eyes flit to the end table, staring at the flowers and the cards she has left for him. She snorts as she rolls her eyes. “I bet they wouldn’t even notice if I didn’t come home at all.”

 

It’s only an afterthought. Lydia doesn’t mean it, but five hours later, she curls up asleep on his bed as he sits in the wheelchair, staring out the window.

 

-

 

Lydia wakes up in the middle of the night in the hospital bed and opens her eyes to an unfocused blackness. She sits up, dress and jacket ruched, her back aching, and stretches out to alleviate the cramps.

 

Peter is staring at her.

 

She gasps with a jolt, scrambling backward until she hits the headboard. His eyes follow her. She doesn’t scream, but her breath catches and heart races, and she is scared. She is unexplainably, irrevocably frightened beyond any reasonable need to be.

 

Peter sits in his wheelchair at the edge of the bed and does nothing. He doesn’t even blink, but his eyes followed her. She saw them move. A slow exhale leaves her lips, her heart beat calming down as well. Somehow he must have managed to turn himself around. He isn’t facing the window anymore. Lydia tries to tell herself one of the nurses did it, but if one of the nurses did it, they would have woken her up and sent her home. They probably would have revoked her volunteering privileges and banned her, too.

 

For a long while, he just stares at her. She stares back.

 

Lydia swallows, her eyelids fluttering. “H—hello,” she finally says. She doesn’t know why she said it. He has never spoken to her before.

 

Peter’s hands grip the wheelchair. A moment later, he pushes himself up. Lydia scrambles back again, her head hitting the board behind it, but it accumulates in nothing. Peter loses his hold, his balance, his legs weak from disuse, and he falls. Gasping, Lydia slips sideways off the bed, forgetting all of her fear, and rushes to his side to help him.

 

There are noises in his throat, something akin to distress, but no words come out of his mouth. She cradles his head in her arms because she can’t pick him up and put him on the bed. She can’t move him. He weighs too much.

 

“It’s all right,” Lydia says, her voice feeling disconnected from her body. She has never done anything like this before. It’s weird, and her skin crawls. “You’re all right,” she soothes, a hand in his hair, and the sounds die off.

 

She isn’t sure how long she stays like that on the floor with him, but she does.

 

-

 

The next day he is back in his wheelchair, unmoving.

 

Lydia feels the quickening of her heart as soon as she enters the hospital and the sensation of eyes on her back once she enters his room, so as much as she doesn’t want to bolt and leave him alone again, she does.

 

This goes on for about two weeks.

 

She is in and out as quickly as possibly for it to count and nothing longer.

 

She still feels the eyes on her back when she leaves.

 

-

 

It goes on for two weeks until the third week comes around, and Lydia considers breaking off her volunteer work and ending it. It was one thing when Peter was catatonic, but now the possibility that she might have to genuinely interact with him is terrifying for reasons she can’t even explain.

 

The nurses don’t seem to be aware of it, and Lydia doesn’t tell them. She knows she will get in trouble for it, anyway, especially since she didn’t say anything.

 

She makes it to his room and sits down across from him. Lydia thinks she at least owes him an explanation before she’s gone for good.

 

“I’m no longer going to be volunteering,” she says, heart fluttering in her chest. It skyrockets as soon as she sees his eyes move at her words. As if broken from his trance, Peter’s eyes acknowledge her.

 

She doesn’t get up and run. Every muscle in her body screams for it, but she does not do it.

 

His lips part slowly as he tries to speak. “P—pl—ease,” Peter mumbles. The next thing just sounds like a grunt because he forgets to open his mouth or can’t, but then it comes out like a word. “N—no.”

 

Lydia feels her lips trembling. She can’t do this. She can’t.

 

She gets up and hurries for the door, halting when she hears his voice call out to her. Loud enough for her to hear, not loud enough to extend beyond the room.

 

“Ly . . . lyd . . . ya,” and she freezes deep inside.

 

Slowly, Lydia turns to face him. He is half-facing her, too, with a pleading look in his eyes. She walks a few steps toward him again, ignoring the way her chest has begun to hurt. “How do you know my name?” she asks until it dawns on her. He might remember more than that. Her jaw falls loose. “How much . . . how much of what I told you do you remember?”

 

A pained expression fills his eyes because he can’t answer that question yet, she realizes, he can’t form a sentence that long, but he opens his lips a fraction as if to at least try.

 

Lydia hurries back to him. “No, wait, I’m sorry—don’t try. You can’t move that fast, I should know better, I’m sorry—” She sighs, guilt washing over her for her selfish desire to leave. To return her comfort, and leave him all alone again. Her eyes well up with tears as she really thinks about it. “I’m such a horrible person . . . ”

 

A sound comes out of him again, not quite a word, but it sounds like _no_.

 

With resignation, Lydia sits down again in the chair. She stares back at him while he stares at her.

 

“I’ll stay,” she says in a soft voice. “I’ll help you speak again.”

 

He doesn’t say anything, but a warmth floods his eyes and he seems happy.

 

-

 

It takes weeks before he can say a short word without stuttering. Months before he can string a sentence together, but he struggles with every word. She doesn’t push him for answers, but she does realize the nurses aren’t aware of the change in his condition, so she brings it up one day.

 

“We should tell nurses you’re awake now,” Lydia says. “I don’t know why you want to hide it.”

 

He barely shakes his head. “No,” Peter says. “I don’t . . . I don’t . . . want to be . . . their lab rat.”

 

“But this changes so much.”

 

“Not yet,” he says, raising his eyes to hers. “Please.”

 

Lydia doesn’t agree with it, but she respects his decision. She keeps it to herself when she leaves and notices how he goes back to being unresponsive with all of the nurses whenever they come into his room. Something ticks in the back of her head, a strange feeling she can’t identify, but she ignores it.

 

She is sure when he feels better, he will tell them.

 

-

 

Peter asks her if she will bring him paper, a pen, and an envelope. She does, and the next time she comes to visit him, he gives her the envelope. There is a name she can barely read on it and an address. He asks her if she will send it off. “It’s an old friend,” he says.

 

Lydia agrees. The envelope is already sealed, so she doesn’t peek.

 

Besides, if he wants to get in touch with old friends, then maybe it’s the beginning of a fresh start.

 

-

 

Less than a week later, Lydia comes to visit him and finds him gone. None of the nurses know anything, except for one. She says one of his family members came and picked him up and signed him out. Lydia feels a sinking sensation in the pit of her stomach until she realizes it’s there because she may never see him again.

 

“Can I see the name?” Lydia asks. “Of who checked him out?”

 

The two nurses behind the desk give each other a look, but it isn’t going to harm anything, so they let her look.

 

 _Laura Hale_ , reads the printed name beside the signature.

 

“She said she was his niece,” one of the nurses informs Lydia, but Lydia’s mind is already far away and the voice is only an echo.

 

-

 

Lydia keeps coming back to the hospital, hoping to see him, but his room has a new occupant, and so she stops going.

 

On the way back to her house that night, she gets out of her car in the driveway. She feels a set of eyes on her back, so she turns to look. Nobody is there. It’s dark outside, too dark to really see anything, so she ignores it and goes inside.

 

She barely sleeps, a bright full moon hanging outside in her window.

 

A noise wakes her up in the middle of the night, and Lydia isn’t sure what it was or where it came from, but she leaves her bed to investigate the house and to get something to drink from the refrigerator. Lydia hears something rustling outside the door in the kitchen, though, and everything seizes up inside of her. Her hairs stand on end along the back of her neck, and she shouldn’t investigate.

 

She shouldn’t, but she does.

 

She grasps the handle, twisting it open. The door gives way easily, and a breeze blows in through the open door. It tickles her bare legs and feet, and Lydia steps outside, holding a cold glass of water in one hand. She has no idea why she does it, but she calls out to the moonlit darkness. “Hello?”

 

Silence answers her. A breeze blows, catching in her hair.

 

A rustling sound echoes back at her from the trees behind her house.

 

Carefully, she places the glass down by the doorway on the first step. Her feet, of their own accord, begin to walk towards the source of the noise.

 

A growl fills the silence to her left.

 

Lydia freezes for only a moment, and then she runs.

 

She runs, tearing into the trees. It’s the closest escape. She wouldn’t have made it back to the house in time, and instinct took her towards the forest.

 

She runs and runs and runs.

 

Her feet are scratched and sore and bleeding by the time she trips and falls down on her face, scrambling to crawl upright again, when growling fills the air behind her and prevents her from trying to escape.

 

Turning over slowly, she faces the creature and screams.

 

Her scream seems to give it pause, but not for long. It crawls over her. It doesn’t bite. It doesn’t tear into her flesh. Its eyes glow a deep crimson, and it extends its clawed hand toward her. The beast’s breath is hot and rancid, and Lydia realizes with its hand halfway to her that she is crying when the claws reach her cheek. A sting enters her flesh, not quite piercing, but enough to draw blood. Before she can scream again, the beast lunges and sinks its teeth into her side.

 

With a blinding white hot pain, the world goes dark.

 

-

 

It takes weeks in the hospital before Lydia is healed from the attack.

 

They ask her if she remembers anything, but Lydia says no. It’s not the truth. She remembers everything, but if she tells them, they’ll think she is crazy.

 

A few weeks later, she finds herself sleepwalking sometimes at night. She hears a voice that speaks without words in her head, calling out to her. It feels like a pull in her veins, and she wants to follow it. She wants to answer it.

 

She doesn’t change, not on the outside, but something is changing on the inside.

 

One night, the voice calls to her, and she answers it. She follows the voice all the way to the site in the woods behind her home where she was bitten, wearing just an oversized white t-shirt and underclothes.

 

What Lydia finds isn’t a beast, but a man. He sits on the log of a dead fallen tree, long black trench coat in the leaves behind him and both hands neatly in his lap as if he were just sitting there, waiting for her.

 

Slowly, she crosses the forest floor until she stands before him.

 

She recognizes his face. She would know it anywhere. Peter no longer has burn scars marking half of it. His skin is pristine. Even without them, she knows him. He smiles at her, tilting his head. “Lydia,” he croons, curve to his lips like a knife. “My darling Lydia. I’ve been waiting for you.”

 

Realization dawns on her, her head feeling cloudy and uncertain. She is petrified, but she stays. “It was you,” she says.

 

His smile grows, reaching his eyes. “Yes, it was me.”

 

“You tried to kill me . . . ”

 

Peter furrows his brow. “Kill you?” he repeats, looking skeptical. “I would never do such a thing, Lydia. You wouldn’t have died, or I wouldn’t have done it.”

 

Her head swims, the cloudy feeling growing stronger. “I don’t understand . . . ”

 

A sigh leaves his lips as he stands up. “You won’t turn,” Peter explains, walking around her, his hand grazing along her shoulders. She wants to pull away from his touch, only her body doesn’t move. Her feet are rooted in place. “But you will change. You are changing now as we speak.” He comes back around to her field of vision, placing both hands on her shoulders. Peter smiles again, but the sight only twists her stomach into knots.

 

“There is a bond between us now, Lydia. An unbreakable bond. It will survive, even beyond the grave.” Peter reaches out for her chin, his claws a gentle caress when they could just as easily slice open her throat. He places his thumb against her chin and holds it in place, even though she doesn’t move. “Isn’t that lovely?”

 

Lydia wants to shake her head as she says _no_ , but she can’t bring herself to move. She gulps, her lips trembling as his thumb caresses them. He lifts his eyes back to hers, smiling again.

 

Peter’s smile turns into a look of concern as he places a hand tenderly against her cheek. His palm is warm. Lydia doesn’t intend to lean into it, but she does. “You should rest, sweetheart. You look tired, and you’ll need your strength. We have a lot of work to do soon. Very, very soon.”

 

Lydia closes her eyes, nodding her head. A sensation of fog lays over her mind as she crawls to the forest floor beneath his feet and curls up into a little ball beside him. Peter sits back down on the log, and a sigh escapes her lungs as she feels his fingers comb through her hair, grazing along her scalp.

 

“My sweet, darling Lydia,” he says, and she smiles as she presses into the touch, falling asleep.

 

 


End file.
